Pakistan’s Deadly Floods Are Not Worsened by Climate Change, BBC

From ClimateREALISM

By Linnea Lueken

The BBC posted an article, “Devastation on repeat: How climate change is worsening Pakistan’s deadly floods,” which, as the title suggests, claims that recent monsoon flooding in Pakistan was worsened by climate change. This is false. Data don’t indicate that monsoon floods are worse now than in the past, and the article offers an alternative explanation for the amount of damage: more people settling in flood prone areas.

The BBC reports annual monsoons in Pakistan have often brought deadly flooding, but claims that Pakistan “is struggling with the devastating consequences of climate change, despite emitting just 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions.”

They go on to say that “[i]n every province, climate change was having a different impact,” and “the poor suffer most.”

The article highlights several major floods that resulted in tragic deaths and major damage to infrastructure, but the one that has the most claim to being allegedly “climate change driven” was the first, when monsoon floods destroyed “hundreds of homes” from landslides and flash flooding in Gilgit-Baltistan. The BBC tied this destruction to climate change by describing how melting glaciers in the Himalayas, Karakoram, and Hindu Kush can create glacial lakes that can burst and flood villages.

The BBC ignored an earlier article discussing the formation of a temporary lake due to a glacier burst that dammed a river in August, along with a few other glacier bursts causing flooding. That article interviews a local figure who says that these flooding events are nothing new. He told Dawn.com that “lakes being formed by natural floods in the area were an ongoing phenomenon for a long time,” at least as far back in his memory as the 1980s, and that some of them become popular scenic tourist destinations. So, the lakes were not formed by recent glacial melt; they have been building for decades. That doesn’t make up for the loss of life and property, but it does add perspective.

Glacial retreat and melting is nothing new, and it does not appear to be happening very fast. In the case of the Himalayas, researchers recently reported that those glaciers are melting much more slowly than expected. And, again, this isn’t even a new trend. By 1950, the earth already lost 75 percent of glaciers, which had hit a short term peak by 1850, before the end of the little ice age. During that period, glaciers expanded, threating small mountain villages, as reports, wood cuts, and other art from the time show.

History shows that ice-dams burst and drown villages around the world even during times when glaciers are advancing, like during the little ice age.

In order to show that monsoons are worsening due to climate change in Pakistan, there needs to be data indicating a long-term trend of monsoon seasons becoming more extreme with more precipitation and flooding. However, available data actually show nothing of the sort. As explained in “Climate Change Is Not Making the South Asian Monsoon More Dangerous, Phys.org,” the South Asian monsoon, impacting India and Pakistan alike, waxes and wanes over decades and centuries, with no apparent pattern. Other Climate Realism posts (here, for instance) have debunked this claim as well. The media hypes similar unverified assertions every time there is a very wet monsoon season, but long-term data doesn’t show a consistent pattern of worsening monsoon rains.

The other floods that the BBC article references were caused by things like cloudbursts and other short-term weather patterns that have nothing to do with global warming.

Interestingly, later in the article, BBC offers an explanation for the flooding severity completely unrelated to climate change:

In villages and cities, millions have settled around rivers and streams, areas prone to flooding. Pakistan’s River Protection Act – which prohibits building within 200 ft (61m) of a river or its tributaries – was meant to solve that issue. But for many it’s simply too costly to settle elsewhere.

Illegal construction makes matters worse.

Climate scientist Fahad Saeed blames this on local corruption and believes officials are failing to enforce the law. He spoke to the BBC in Islamabad, next to a half-built, four-story concrete building as big as a car park – and right by a stream that he saw flood this summer, killing a child.

Worse, the BBC reports on the sad fact that many poor Pakistanis rebuild in the same places that flooded previously because they can’t afford to move. This is not unusual in underdeveloped parts of the world. Climate Realism covered the same issue with regular floods in developing parts of Nigeria. There, explosive population growth along flood-prone rivers has caused issues for water management. However, people continue to build in flood zones even as regular flooding destroys their homes.

This isn’t a climate problem, it is a poverty, infrastructure, and city planning problem. People reasonably prefer to live near a major and reliable water source, but major water sources flood, especially in lowlands and valleys. Development that involves paving roads and parking lots, impermeable surfaces, will lead to increased water flow unless it is addressed sufficiently during the planning stages. If not, water will pool that has nowhere to go but into residences and commercial buildings, sometimes sweeping them away.

Had the BBC focused on the infrastructure, poverty, and poor governance issues that resulted in recent deadly flooding it would have made a positive contribution to highlighting a serious problem, not just in Pakistan but in other impoverished communities along rivers where rainfall is high. Instead, most of its story is a red herring. It focuses on climate change despite the fact there is no trend suggesting the slight warming of the past century-and-a-half has changed monsoon patterns, which both plague and benefit India and Pakistan. The BBC turned the piece that could have been a rational criticism of corruption that leads to major infrastructure issues and human deaths into a propaganda piece that pushes the idea that degrowth and de-industrialization is what will save Pakistan, when the opposite is true.